


Rise

by Kyra_Neko_Rei



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Defiance, Gen, Grief, Lily Lives AU, Lily is a BAMF, Mourning, Muggle Culture, Recovery, Wizarding Traditions, but also kinda brittle at the moment, feelings are not always what they're supposed to be, grief can be weird sometimes, hints of PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-27 00:03:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8379676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra_Neko_Rei/pseuds/Kyra_Neko_Rei
Summary: When Voldemort came to kill Harry, Lily met him with a SIG Sauer pistol she bought at a pawn shop. Seems Dark Lords die as easily as anyone else when you empty two clips into them.
Hailed as the savior of the Wizarding world, Lily has a live baby, a dead husband, the personal enmity of most of the Dark Lord's followers, and not the slightest idea how to put her life back together.
Phoenixes have it easy. Burn, die, rise from the ashes.
For humans it's a bit different. Sort of.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the-last-hair-bender on Tumblr, who posted about the concept of Lily going and buying a pistol from a Muggle pawn shop and shooting Voldemort when he came to kill Harry. My brain jumped to the aftermath, Lily after she's killed the Dark Lord and saved Harry, but she hasn't saved James. In the book they went out together, and Harry, the survivor, was insulated from the loss by being a baby. For Lily, that wouldn't be the case.

The neighbors hear the gunshots, but it is some minutes, and probably some frantic Floo calls, before anyone comes running, and when they do they’re headed by Magical Law Enforcement. Lily knows their arrival by the exclamations of horror which tell her they’ve found James. She wonders if Voldemort used the killing curse, or some horrid hex that blasted him apart. She doesn’t know  which would be worse, a jumble of body parts or a pristine, lifeless shell, everything about him whole except for the part that’s  _him_.

She doesn’t go to find out, and they find her crosslegged on the floor, Harry in her arms, the wreckage of Voldemort spattered across the walls and puddled on the floor. They stare, gawkers and Aurors alike, in silence, until Kingsley breaks the silence with, “Sweet Merlin, Lily, what did you  _do_?”

-

For most of a day she doesn’t let Harry out of her arms. She answers questions, explains the concept of guns more times than she feels is reasonable, navigates the crowds of people come to see the Savior of the Wizarding World, and handles their adulation, which is worse. She sees James before they can stop her, crumpled in front of the stairs, and has to grab the bannister to steady herself. So courageous, to face the Dark Lord without a wand or a hope besides that his own death would serve a momentary delay.

It had.

She steps out of the house, has to, and into a sea of onlookers; the bright hammering of multiple flashbulbs makes her raise her wand, and it is Mad-Eye of all people who taps her wand arm and murmurs, “Cameras.” She didn’t know he had it in him.

It seems like all of Wizarding Britain has turned out to see her, to celebrate. Flowers are conjured and thrown, fireworks are set off, purebloods who’ve sneered at the sight of her are chanting her name, someone is playing the bagpipes, someone is playing the tuba. Lucius Malfoy comes up from nowhere and almost obsequiously shakes her hand, his thanks so heartfelt and sincere she’s positive it’s a lie. Behind him is Narcissa, her own son held in her arms, cooler and more sincere than her husband, Lily thinks, for the hint of annoyance she betrays at being saved by a muggleborn.

Little Draco saves the moment by setting eyes on Harry and shrieking and waving his arms, trying to grasp at Lily’s child like he’s a special holiday sweet; Harry opens his eyes and watches Draco, bemused, and Lily nearly doubles over trying to stifle a laugh at the conflict of emotions on Narcissa’s face.

They make way for other admirers, and Lily is reminded momentarily of the receiving line at her wedding. Tears blind her, and she hugs Harry close and turns away. The flashbulbs go off again, and this time the urge to hex someone is not mere mindless reaction.

She straightens up again, turning toward the house. Not home anymore, not with James cut down in the stairway, but a refuge from crowds and admiration and joy. Halfway through the turn, she sees a face at the back of the crowd, and freezes.

They stare at each other for a long moment, and then Lily completes her turn and goes back into the house, leaving Severus staring after her. Fireworks bang in the sky overhead, and the door bangs shut behind her.

-

Eventually she lets Harry into the arms of Andromeda Tonks and goes to take a shower. There is blood in her hair, blood on her clothes, the itch-tingle of dark magic and an acrid hint of gunpowder. She is surprised to see her face in the mirror, blood-spattered and surprisingly fierce.

Hidden under the spray of hot water, she sobs.

-

The water doesn’t turn cold in magical households, and so it is a bang on the door that reminds her that there is a world beyond her own tangled nightmare of misery and relief. She dries off and gets dressed, feeling as though she’d poured some portion of her humanity down the drain with her tears.

-

Everybody is pushing, now that the barest edges have worn off the elation and people recognize that she’s lost her husband. She is alone, and yet crowded to the point of claustrophobia, and spends a lot of time clinging to Harry and does a lot of nodding and thanking people. There are still fireworks in the sky, and eventually she summons James’ invisibility cloak and escapes to the roof, watching the colors bloom against the stars, trying hard to feel nothing and mostly succeeding.

-

The next day brings the dreary task of putting James’ affairs in order. She’s done this before in the past few years, with James’ parents (dragon pox) and her own (cancer and heart attack), and obscenely, it’s nearly routine. She ventures out, once, to Gringotts to have James’ vault key melted and her own reforged, dithers over funeral arrangements, and scandalizes the magical solicitor with her disinclination to stay in the Potter house, ancient and charming and with James’ body clear in her mind every time she sets eyes on the stairs.

It isn’t until someone asks if she’s told her sister yet that she breaks down.

Petunia. Once as close as, well, a sister. Now distant and contemptuous, with a disdaining boor of a husband and a cardboard-cutout life in some affluent suburb, one with the sort of people who looked down on them as they grew up.

Just like Severus Snape (and wouldn’t they both hate that comparison).

Lily closes her eyes and thinks of the pair of them as small girls, planning their weddings in intricate detail. They’d sworn to be each other’s maids of honor.

Petunia’s actual maid of honor had been Vernon’s horrible sister Marge. There had been seven bridesmaids, none of them Lily. Two of them had asked Lily what doing drugs was like, as if someone had caused them to expect her to know. And Petunia hadn’t come to Lily’s wedding at all.

Lily opens her eyes again and says, “I already wrote to her.”

-

Sirius shows up at midmorning the next day, the right side of his face scarred by what looks like a Dark curse mixed with a bite that could have been delivered by a Rodent Of Unusual Size from  _The Princess Bride_. He meets her with a humorless smile, says, “Pettigrew’s taken care of,” and goes into the dining room where James lies in state. Lily tactfully closes the door on her way out, leaving him undisturbed with his grief.

-

James is buried on the fifth of November. Lily stands by the open grave and scans the crowd, wondering if Severus will dare show his face here. She will hex him to the moon and back if he does.

The casket is wood in the tradition of wizards, with inlays of mahogany, his wand-wood. There is a stag artfully carved into its lid, and his name and the days of his life. The earth, falling on top of it, makes a hollow sound, and Lily imagines him pushing it open, climbing out, laughing at the joke of himself being dead.

It rings false. A happy illusion, no more. James is gone, passed Beyond, and Lily can’t even imagine otherwise.

Harry points to the stag on the casket, chortling gleefully and saying, “Da!” Lily thinks of all the times James entertained their son by transforming into a stag, letting himself be petted and cuddled; she thinks of the pagan Horned God, the one who dies, the sacrifice, and weeps anew at the symbolism.

Harry fusses when the dirt begins to obscure the stag. Lily clutches him close and cries. At some point, when the last prong of the antlers is covered by dirt, Harry does too.

-

That night is Bonfire Night. Guy Fawkes Day. A Muggle holiday commemorating an attempt to blow up Parliament.

More symbolism, which hurts, and a sort of wild defiance, which also hurts, but in a different way. Less like the pain of drowning, and more like the pain of breathing again.

Lily prowls the house as afternoon shades into evening, still wearing the funeral robes she’d fallen asleep in. Harry is in the company of Molly, Andromeda, and half-a-dozen small children. There are two house-elves in the kitchen, on loan from somebody, doing the dishes. Remus and Sirius are asleep on the couch.

Somewhere outside, a few fireworks go off, and Lily thinks of childhood, for once not in terms of the two people who were so much part of her life then but not now. Instead, bonfires. Fireworks wrapped in brightly colored paper, her father setting them off with a match and singing his fingers every year until he started using rolled-up newspaper as an intermediary, and bright flowers blooming against the dark. Taking an attempted act of destruction, and turning it into a party.

Lily goes upstairs, shuts the door, casts off the mourning robes and casts an  _Incendio_. While they burn, she digs in the drawer for her favorite Muggle things, worn jeans that hug her like a second skin, a pair of iconic black-and-white Converse sneakers that some pureblood once looked outright  _pained_  at, and a Star Wars T-shirt which she then hides under a red-and-gold sweater. Her mother had made it for her, back when she had first been sorted into Gryffindor, and the red fades into the gold fades into the red again, like fire. Like a phoenix, rising defiantly from its ashes. She's charmed it to fit her again and again.

In the hall closet are the Filibuster fireworks Sirius brought them for tonight, back a week ago when they were all alive. In the pantry there’s a bottle of Firewhiskey that cost seventeen galleons and tastes like molten gold.

She goes out, draws her wand, apparates to a part of Muggle London she’s always found a bit charming, because Petunia had sneered at it through the car window on a family trip the summer Lily was twelve.

It is dark here, the lights from the buildings casting the street into greater shadow by contrast, and there are flashes and bangs coming from everywhere. Down the street is a bonfire, and behind it, another.

Lily can feel the grief in her. It is slumbering against her heart, and soon enough it will awaken and she’ll have to deal with it again.

Not right now, though.

Lily, taking her offerings to whatever party will have her, goes to the bonfires, a phoenix looking to rise.


End file.
